Will PJ Harvey win the 2011 Mercury prize?

The Barclaycard Mercury music prize has traditionally rewarded fresh faces but
this year experience might trump novelty.

While it may originally have taken its title from a now-defunct telephone company, the Mercury music prize is defined more by the properties it shares with its namesake chemical element.

Over 20 years, the award has come to be seen as a barometer for new currents in music, shape-shiftingly unpredictable in its criteria for picking winners and occasionally toxic to those who carry off first prize.

The Mercury has not always chosen what history goes on to regard as the prime proponents of these new movements, though – thus it was Gomez who carried the flag for Nineties widescreen indie rather than Radiohead, and Ms Dynamite who took the podium for the millennial sound of British garage rather than the Streets.

And then, of course, there is the dreaded curse of the Mercury. Everyone from Primal Scream and Pulp to Franz Ferdinand have failed to match the critical and commercial success of their prize-winning albums, and statistically few bands follow the creative glory of their early years.

Which makes the current favourite for this year’s Mercury even more of a curiosity. PJ Harvey heads the bookies’ odds list with Let England Shake, her eighth album: astonishingly long in the tooth for this particular prize.

What’s even more noteworthy is that if she does win, it will be the first time that an act has done so twice; and also that the Dorset singer already holds the number-one position for having won with the longest-into-a-career-record: her fifth, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, in 2001.

However, what makes the Mercury a bookmaker’s nightmare is that being the favourite can mean so little. Statistically more likely to win over Harvey are the flag-bearing youngsters, whether in the shape of Anna Calvi, James Blake, Katy B or Tinie Tempah.

Yet, if Harvey does take it, it will be a sweet victory for a songwriter who has made a career out of defiantly making music to her own tune, in her own time.